Reflections
by Sailor J-chanDuoxHilde 4ever
Summary: Vegeta reflects on his life as he is about to kill himself to stop Majin Buu. R/R! REVIEWS MAKE ME A VERY VERY HAPPY GIRL!


Disclaimer-Me no own characters/scene

Summary-My shot at this. Vegeta reflects on his life as he is about to kill himself to beat Majin Buu. Told in Vegeta's POV.

Reflections

"What did you do to him?" Goten screams at me. "Why'd you do that?"

Goten starts screaming at me furiously. He thinks I've killed Trunks. Feh, as if I'd kill my own spawn.

As I punch out Goten, a thought strikes me. When I was 8, I didn't have a best friend like my son does. I was busy training under Frieza.

Frieza. To this day, the name of Frieza haunts me.

I think back to those days while the Namekian is explaining to me about Other World. 

I was 5 when I officially became a member of Frieza's crew, and moved to Planet Ice. I remember all the pain and humiliation of being slave to him. All the times he left me for dead, beat me, and attempted, truly, to kill me are embedded in my mind and forever will be. Even after death.

I know I'm going to die. I suppose Piccolo's question was supposed to be a stupid rhetorical one. I'm not…no, I correct myself. I _am_ afraid to die. But I know what I have to do. This will be a warrior's last stand. This is how I want to die…on the battlefield that has always been a home to me.

"That will be all," I say to Piccolo. "Get out of here…and hurry!"

Piccolo, with the two boys, flies off into the distance to find Krillin. My sensitive Saiyan ears pick up their conversation:

"What does Vegeta think he's doing?" Krillin asks Piccolo. "He's crazy! He won't make it! That monster's gonna eat him alive!"

"For the first time," Piccolo answers, "Vegeta is fighting for someone other than himself…"

I stop listening at that. How soon the green bean forgets those 7 years ago when my future son was killed by Cell. 

I hadn't realized, up until then, how much the brat meant to me. When he died, I felt something jolt inside of me. It was one of the few times I felt sorrow. 

Despite how Frieza had tried to make me an adult mass-murderer who didn't mind destruction, the reason why I really didn't care about Vegetasei being destroyed was that I was too young to understand that my home was gone and that Nappa, Radditz, Kakarot, and I were the only ones left. When it finally hit me, Frieza had implanted the emotions-are-weakness idea in me, and I found myself not caring at all. I was a warrior. If I cared, I was weak. The time for mourning had passed—in fact, it had never existed. 

I didn't care. I shouldn't care. I MUSTN'T care.

I was never remorseful for those I killed. I was supposed to be strong. Remorse was emotion. Emotions were weakness. I told myself that over and over again, like a child learning the alphabet, memorizing it, living by it. I'm the Saiyan prince. I'm strong. I don't need emotions. Those who died had emotions, and look where they were. I wouldn't end up like them, I told myself. Never would I end up like them.

It took dying to make me feel sorrow. That's when I realized that my thinking was all wrong, that emotions made me stronger. Emotions, my emotions, were part of what gave Kakarot the strength to kill Frieza. For the first time in my life I felt sorrow—sorrow that I'd been Frieza's pet, that we'd all been Frieza's pets. I felt sorrow that I, the strongest Saiyan in existence, had been used and discarded.

I felt that again when I got to Earth and got involved with Bulma. She had been with Scar-face at the time, and one night she came home crying. It turned out that he'd told her that he fell in love with someone else. I felt, for some reason, that I couldn't leave her to cry, so I gave comfort as best I could. I advised her to give him up. She didn't take me seriously, and fought for Scar-face tooth and nail. It ended in disaster, and she left home. She got in a car crash and quite nearly died, with a rib puncturing her lung. There was nothing they could do for her.

At that time I disappeared. I knew that New Namek had Dragonballs. I stole a space pod and went to New Namek. I forced the Elders to give them to me, and I summoned Porunga.

Here, I stood at the crossroads. I had ample opportunity to wish for immortality. That was my life-long dream. I would be crazy not to wish for it. Eternal life was so close, I could taste it.

I wished for Bulma's rib to heal.

I returned to Earth about the time Bulma returned from the hospital. No one knew what I'd done except me and the Nameks, though I suppose she sensed that I'd done something for her. We began to get emotionally involved, though we never truly dated. She always hung around the GR, waiting to see if I got hurt. At night I would stand at her door and look in, making sure she was asleep. I suppose our feelings just grew and grew until, one morning, I woke up beside her.

I didn't know she was pregnant. All I knew was that one day, I got out of the GR to find herself being kissed by Scar-face. And she was wasn't fighting him. She was smiling.

That's when I lost it. That's when I felt sorrow again. Sorrow and rage and insanity, all building up inside me until it threatened to kill me. That's when I reached Super Saiyan, not in space as the others say. I reached it the day I thought that history had repeated itself, that I'd been used and discarded yet again.

Scar-face went to check out the power, but I'd left. I'd already stolen another ship and gone to space, fully intending to stay there, the Hell with Earth and Bulma. Let the androids destroy the planet. I didn't care.

That was what I told myself. But Earth wasn't finished with me. The meteor shower that almost killed me made me think. If I should die a painful death, the woman who'd used me should, too. I'd go back and fight the androids and let her see how much I didn't need her in my life. And then I'd kill her for destroying me again.

When I saw that she'd had a baby, I figured that it had to be Scar-face's. The child had no tail that I could see and it looked nothing like me. Perfect, I thought. I could kill her spawn as well. Mirai Trunks, when he appeared, looked amazingly like the child, but I put no stock in it. I didn't connect the two when I found out that he was my son from the future. I'd forgotten that he was supposed to have been born about the time the baby had been born.

When Bulma's plane blew up, I paid it no mind, except anger that I hadn't had the chance to do it myself. Let her cheating self and her progeny die. They meant nothing to me.

Well, they didn't die, and when Cell gave us the few days to train, I went back to CC to confront her. It was then I realized that I'd made a huge mistake. When I grabbed her and forced her to tell me everything, she revealed what she'd kept hidden.

The boy had a tail.

She went on to explain that she'd been coming to the GR to tell me that she was pregnant when Scar-face showed up. The two hadn't spoken for a long time, and he'd come to tell her that he'd broken up with the other girl and even though he wasn't interested in her in that way, that he hoped they could be friends. Then she told him that she was pregnant, and he'd grabbed her up and kissed her in congratulations. That's when I walked out and saw the two of them, and had took it completely the wrong way. All it was, was a bad sense of timing. 

Her tale seemed so strange and flimsy that I half-refused to believe it, even if the child had a tail. I ignored them completely and began training again. I didn't want to kill her anymore. I just wanted to leave her be.

Then Kakarot died, and Mirai Trunks died, or so we thought, and once again I felt sorrow, rage, insanity. Now it felt like the world had used and discarded me, that the universe was messing with me for its amusement. I lost it then and there and nearly got myself killed into the bargain.

The Cell Games were over, and I returned to CC. In my own time, I believed Bulma, and there was no denying the authenticity of the baby's tail. But those feelings I'd felt for a long time, ever since I was a whelp of 5 years, remained in me. Sorrow of being used and thrown away, hatred of Frieza and Kakarot and Scar-face, incompetence for being weak and stupid—those feelings couldn't go away, no matter how hard I tried to discard them.

That, I think, was what Babadi saw. I had already been riled up that Kakarot had skipped out on our match, but that wasn't nearly enough to bring evil out of me. Buried sorrow, hatred, stupidity, and self-contempt were what did me in. Those feelings got me into this mess.

And these feelings that I have just recently realized—love for Bulma and Trunks, a kind of comrade-in-arms-ship with Kakarot, even a civil tolerance of the other fighters—will hopefully get me out of it.

I find myself screaming at Buu, "Yes, that right! Your fight is with me. The others are of no concern to you. Got it, you big bloated balloon freak?"

That is the worst insult I've ever given. The mixing of emotions distorts your sense of reason—and your ability to throw a good, verbal punch.

Majin Buu is angry now, and I know it is time to strike.

Bulma, you may not know it, but I love you. Go on living without me, and grow up strong, my son. Kakarot, when you return to Other World, I'll be waiting to beat you.

As my body starts to implode with that power I felt years ago, I am smirking. This is the power I felt when I thought Bulma had used me. Only the welling-up of such strong emotions can make this power. But this time, it's not rage giving it to me—it's love, something, for along time, I never thought I'd ever feel.

Frieza, I can't wait to see you in Hell so I can show you what I've become. I've gone on to SSL2, something you said could never be done. Well, take a look at me, your little pet monkey, now! You always told me that emotions were weakness. Emotion is giving me this power. I'll show you what emotions have made of me—and then I'll give you a beating you'll never forget, just like you used to give me.

May Hell accept me. I don't care where I go now, because I know that I've lived my life as best I could, and discovered that emotions are strength.

Well, what did you think? Good? Bad? Stupid? Sappy? Review and tell me! ^-^

Yeah, I know the ending isn't what happened on TV, but I think the Funimation ending sucks compared to what some other authors wrote, so I decided to put my own little bits in it.

REVIEW!!


End file.
